Ladies vs Duquesne

[72 Roo]

I took in the soccer ladies match against Duquesne today and came away feeling coach Pfau has not left this program as good as we would wish. To his credit coach Croft played nearly all his players. We have a serious lack of speed up top and in the outside backs. The Dukes' forwards repeatedly turned the corner on our backs and went to goal. Our speed up top is a problem. We had several opportunities to outrace the defenders and could not get a step on any of them by our forwards or outside mids. I also noticed we lacked anyone who took on a defender with moves when in 1v1 situations. Our goalkeeping was shaky. The one goal was in part due to poor coordination from the keeper and the back line.

I do like the way coach Croft seems to have thrown out Pfau's very direct and boring play with long balls that usually end up with us just giving it away to the defense. This team repeatedly built the attack from the back and used the mids out wide to open up the field and find space for our attackers. They lacked the penetrating runs we have seen from the men's team but this style could be quite an improvement if we can find some speed and players capable of penetrating runs.

Exhibition games are for working out your problems, but I honestly thought that we would dominate the Dukes. The opposite was true, especially in the second half when the Dukes should have gotten two more wide-open goals. This team has even depth from top to bottom. It lacks however the top level player like Ampai who can pick up the team when needed and pull in other top level talent because of their presence.

I hope coach Croft is the guy to put it all together for the ladies.

[mes102]

The one thing I did notice was that Coach Croft is already a better coach than Coach Pfau ever was here at Akron. If you ever saw a Coach Pfau team on game day, he wasn't really hands on. He never left his seat, unless he had something to say to an official. Coach Croft yesterday, was pacing up and down the sideline pointing, yelling, talking to players where they needed to be, and especially took time out to talk to players when they came out of the game to talk to them what they needed to do, and even saw him pointing and telling them where they needed to go or do what on the field.

You have to also remember that Coach Croft has only been the interim head coach for about a month now, and he had even less time than that with the players. This team is just missing that killer instinct, and Coach Pfau never had that in my opinion. That's what Porter is so good at is getting the killer instinct out of his players. Majority of humans have the motivation/killer instinct towards something. It's just a matter of getting it out of them.Porter seems a great job of doing that, and that's why men's soccer program is at the level of what it is. Be interesting to see Coach Croft has in that department.

Here's Coach Croft's twitter page. He seems very energetic and optimistic about the women's soccer program at Akron, by just looking at the tweets:

Coach Croft's twitter page